“He’s the one character in the movie who doesn’t really want anything from Captain America,” Mackie said in an interview in Miami. Wilson acts at times as the moral compass in the movie, he said, as well as Captain America’s flying sidekick.

Not only is The Falcon the newest addition character-wise to the Marvel line, but he is also the first African-American Marvel superhero to make it to the screen.

“With Sam Wilson, it was such an honor to add him to the Marvel fold because of what he represents to the African-American experience. As we’ve evolved as a people, he’s evolved as a character,” Mackie said.

Mackie has been waiting to play this type of role for the better part of his career, and he spoke of how he would consistently email Marvel offering his services.

“When I finished 'The Hurt Locker' (2008), I felt as though my career was in an upswing and my goal as an actor when I first started was to be a superhero. … I contacted Marvel every six months for five years until I finally got a response saying ‘Never email us again, we’ll call you.’ A year later I got a call saying to come to L.A. to talk about the character.”

Mackie brings gravity and humor to his role as the Falcon, as well as the necessary training that translates in the movie. He worked with his stunt man to learn the logistics of minute details (like how birds land) so that on screen, it would look perfect. Either he or his stunt man did everything in the movie, including leaping off cranes wearing only a four-point harness.

“Marvel’s movies deal 100 percent with placing superheroes in our reality. That’s why we use minimal CGI, that’s why as the actors, we did so many of our own stunts," he said. "It looks real because a lot of it was real. It was Marvel spending the money in the right places.”

Two cross-dressing men who were fired upon by National Security Agency police when they disobeyed orders at a heavily guarded gate had just stolen a car from a man who had picked them up and checked into a motel, police said Tuesday.

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Indiana Gov. Mike Pence asked lawmakers Tuesday to send him a clarification of the state's new religious-freedom law later this week, while Arkansas legislators passed a similar measure, despite criticism that it is a thinly disguised attempt to permit discrimination against gays.